If you gave a cell a GoPro, would it record adrenaline-fuelled cellular activity? Source: Jeremy Yap on Unsplash. Image has been cropped.

Act 1: The Hero’s Journey

Big things can come from small beginnings in genetics. Bacteria, facing harsh environments where they are outnumbered ten-to-one by viral invaders, need something to defend themselves. This is where CRISPR-Cas is equipped – a bacterial adaptive immune system.

It may seem counterintuitive to store parts of your enemies. But the array sequence prints out wanted posters of these viral perps like a ten-year old using a copy machine unsupervised. These posters then get distributed to the ‘Cas9’ sheriffs who police every corner of the cell, watching and waiting to remove the invaders quicker next time.

Act 2: A Trusty Steed

The Harvard research team wanted to test the ordered way foreign sequence data is remembered in bacteria, and then show that it could be decoded. They chose to encode a five-frame, 36 x 26 pixel, version of Eadweard Muybridge’s famous galloping mare and rider from his Human and Animal Locomotion series.

Every pixel of this movie was represented by a black and white binary colour code. Over five days, this binary code was introduced into an Escherichia coli colony via a synthetic DNA sequence. Each nucleotide (an A, T, C or G) made up two digits of binary, and each day a new frame of the film was presented to the bacteria.

They were then allowed to propagate for three weeks, and broken open for their DNA. Following DNA sequencing, the researchers could put the pieces of the film back together with 90% accuracy. Nevertheless, they could watch a slightly grainy version of the mare gallop through the countryside.